Sultan of Swing: The Life of David Butler

By Michael Crick

Sir David Butler pioneered the science of elections, transforming the way we analyse election results. In 1945, aged only twenty, Butler was the first to turn British constituency results into percentages, and thereby founded the science of psephology. Appearing as an expert on Britain's first TV election night in 1950, he promoted the idea of 'swing' to explain gains and losses to the public. Later, he invented the BBC's popular Swingometer, which is still used today. He has publicly analysed every British general election since the Second World War, and done more than anyone to transform TV coverage of elections, with a style that combined authority and showmanship with his phenomenal memory for facts and figures.
First summoned by Churchill for polling advice when he was only twenty-five, David Butler got to know most of Britain's senior post-war politicians and has acted as a highly influential voice behind the scenes. He wrote dozens of books and taught scores of leading figures in politics and the media around the world, building a huge international reputation which regularly took him to America, Australia and India.
Award-winning TV correspondent Michael Crick has known David Butler for forty years. In Sultan of Swing, based on interviews with Butler himself, his friends, family and colleagues, and with access to many previously unseen papers, Crick chronicles the long and energetic life of the greatest analyst of British elections – a story that weaves its way through post-war history with surprises, colour and humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Oct 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785904394

Book preview

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction You Haven’t Much Time!

Chapter One Born to Elections

Chapter Two Gung-Ho for War

Chapter Three In the Absence of Cricket

Chapter Four Surveying America

Chapter Five Into the Family Trade

Chapter Six Telly Don

Chapter Seven A Speedometer Type Device

Chapter Eight Gilded Year in Georgetown

Chapter Nine Buccaneering Butlers

Chapter Ten College Man

Chapter Eleven The Love of His Life

Chapter Twelve Which Is Butler? Which Is Stokes?

Chapter Thirteen An English Don Abroad

Chapter Fourteen Academic Entrepreneur

Chapter Fifteen Consensus Pinko

Chapter Sixteen The Rector’s Husband

Chapter Seventeen The Rules Overturned

Conclusion A Life to the Full

Appendix From Academic Aristocracy

The Butler Family Tree

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

YOU HAVEN’T MUCH TIME!

‘Good night,’ said the old man in the black velvet siren suit. He’d taken his young guest up the winding staircase to show him his overnight quarters in the attic of the red-brick country house. ‘And in bidding me goodnight,’ the visitor would recall, ‘he spoke like any other worldly host, about not forgetting to turn out the lights.’¹

It was well after midnight and, as he sat in his garret bedroom, the Oxford student was still in a bit of a daze, unable quite to believe the encounter he had just had. He took out several sheets of paper and quickly tried to scribble down everything that his famously eloquent host had said. There was so much to remember. The elderly gentleman must have spoken for at least two hours over the course of their evening together. Yet it was with some dismay that the awestruck visitor reached just six pages of notes and could recall nothing more.

The invitation had come out of the blue earlier that very afternoon, the first Monday of February 1950. David Butler, a 25-year-old research student from Nuffield College, Oxford, was in the middle of meetings at the BBC in London, planning the first ever television results programme for the coming general election, which was just seventeen days away.

Could Mr Butler please drop what he was doing, the caller asked, and go immediately that night to talk to the Leader of the Opposition at his home in Kent? ‘Well, obviously, one accepted that sort of invitation,’ Butler recalled years later. ‘And I had an evening which had an enormous effect on my life.’²

Winston Churchill wanted to discuss a long article he’d read in The Economist magazine while enjoying the New Year break in Madeira, writing and painting. The article, entitled ‘Electoral Facts’, had been written by David Butler, but under an anonymous byline – ‘By a Correspondent’. It explored the possible outcome of the looming general election, which at that point Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had not yet called (but was constitutionally obliged to call by the summer of 1950). Butler’s article was well-written and thorough. It discussed recent by-election results, Gallup polls (then still a novelty), the effect of turnout on the outcome, and the new constituency boundaries. Most important, though, the article concluded by unveiling what appeared to be an astonishingly precise formula for calculating the ratio of seats to votes in elections – what soon became known as the Cube Law.³ Butler had spotted that in the three previous British general elections – 1931, 1935 and 1945 – as well as in recent elections in New Zealand, the ratio of the number of seats achieved by the two main parties was related in a cubic way to the number of votes they polled. Churchill was intrigued; it seemed a revelation.

When the election was called by Attlee a few days after publication, and Churchill was obliged to make an early return from Madeira, he was curious to know more. Could the unknown author of this interesting Economist article be tracked down and invited to shed more light on his Cube formula? And, furthermore, to assess Churchill’s chances of returning to Downing Street?

It seems extraordinary today, when general elections are intense, high-activity affairs in which leaders’ long daily diaries are controlled almost to the exact minute, that the Leader of the Opposition in 1950 had a whole weekday evening to himself at home, almost on his own. Why wasn’t he out campaigning, or addressing public meetings, or at least busily preparing his next speech? The relaxed approach is especially curious when one remembers that the election was expected to be very close, and there were only two and a half weeks left for campaigning. Yet here was a 25-year-old Oxford research student taking a commuter train from Charing Cross to brief someone he regarded as ‘the greatest man in the world’. Although he was leaving the bustle of television production for an evening of quiet seclusion in the country, it was surely a daunting prospect.

David Butler was met around eight o’clock at Oxted Station by a driver who took him the short journey to Chartwell, Churchill’s famous country home overlooking the Weald of Kent. He waited nervously in the drawing room for the great man to appear:

I think that he had just come from his bath for he was looking implausibly flesh-tinted and flabby. The croak of many frogs rasped through his voice and so marked was the impediment in his speech … that at the beginning I had difficulty in understanding him. The evening was full of evidence of his kindness and his idiosyncrasies. ‘How very kind of you to come,’ he said as he shook hands.⁴

Yet the meeting didn’t get off to a promising start, Butler recalls, for Churchill ‘got very quickly bored with my attempts to explain the Cube Law to him – he was not very mathematical’.⁵ Most senior politicians in such circumstances today would simply thank their young visitor and dismiss them politely – there was, after all, an election to be won. But instead, Churchill expected Butler to spend the whole evening there, listening to the celebrated raconteur ‘showing off’. Butler remembers Churchill ‘enjoying himself and neglecting the campaign in a manner unthinkable for a party leader today’.

They ate dinner together, and were alone for almost the entire evening. They also listened to the radio election broadcast being given that night by Churchill’s colleague Anthony Eden, and Butler was then asked for his verdict. It was too academic, Butler replied, not enough of a fireside chat. Churchill responded that he had never talked over people’s heads in his election campaigning. Butler records him saying:

I remember in Dundee in 1908 talking on the highest level about free trade to a working-class audience, and being carried on the shoulders of the mob back to my hotel. And in 1940 I never talked down to the British people. I offered them the hardest programme a Prime Minister has ever offered them, and it proved the most popular programme ever propounded: the programme of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’.⁶

The visitor from Oxford told the former Prime Minister he had been only fifteen when he heard the famous speech in 1940, and it had never then occurred to Butler that Britain might be defeated by the Nazis. ‘What? Only fifteen in 1940?’

At that point Churchill counted on his fingers. ‘Fifteen, and that was ten years ago? Ten years ago.’ And Churchill smiled. ‘You haven’t much time, you know. Napoleon was twenty-six when he crossed the bridge at Lodi’ – a reference to the military triumph in Lombardy in 1796, which the French leader subsequently thought launched him on the road to imperial greatness.⁷ ‘Better hurry up, young man, better hurry up,’ Churchill urged, or words to that effect.⁸

David Butler stayed overnight and left after breakfast the next day. It would be many years before he spoke publicly about that astonishing evening in February 1950 (and more details can be found in Chapter Five). Yet the Chartwell visit, he says, was ‘terribly important’ to his subsequent career. ‘I have never been able to be in total awe of any situation or person I have encountered since then. And it all came about through the Cube Law.’⁹

Winston Churchill had already been an MP for almost half a century in 1950, having been elected in 1900, the final year of Queen Victoria’s reign. He would remain in Parliament for another fourteen years. His young guest would enjoy similar longevity and would still be plying his trade almost seventy years later.

I first became aware of David Butler as a schoolboy and student in the 1970s when I started becoming interested in politics and elections. As I scanned the rows of Butler books on the politics shelves of Oxford bookshops, I wondered how one man could be so prolific and also so ubiquitous, with his regular appearances on television and in print, not just in Britain, but in America and Australia, too, and later in India. When I started attending his Friday night seminars at Nuffield College, I don’t think I ever spoke to him – I was too much in awe of this famous figure. It was only when he started working as a pundit for Channel 4 News a few years later that I got to know him, and to appreciate how generous he could be with a very junior journalist.

The great historian Sir Lewis Namier once said: ‘General elections are locks on the stream of British democracy, controlling the flow of the river and its traffic.’¹⁰ This is the extraordinary story of the man who effectively founded the science of elections in Britain – what became known as ‘psephology’. David Butler didn’t confine himself to an audience of academic colleagues, however, but was determined to make elections understandable for a mass audience – to combine scholarship with journalism. It is the account of a life which has been extraordinarily busy and happy, and always lived to the full – many lives, in fact.

CHAPTER ONE

BORN TO ELECTIONS

How fitting. The man who would make his name explaining elections to the British public entered this world right in the middle of a general election campaign.

On 17 October 1924, the day of his birth, Britain was twelve days from going to the polls in the UK’s third general election in less than two years. Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government would be ousted after just nine months in office and replaced by the Conservative Party under Stanley Baldwin. Labour’s election chances may have been badly dented in the final few days by the publication of the Zinoviev letter, which suggested the party was getting orders from the Bolsheviks in Russia – an early example, perhaps, of ‘fake news’ in an election, since the letter is now widely thought to have been forged.

The Butler family were themselves heavily involved in the electoral contest. This was still the era when graduates of Britain’s most established universities elected twelve of their own Members of Parliament. David’s maternal grandfather, the historian A. F. (Albert) Pollard, was standing as Liberal candidate for the University of London seat, which he’d fought unsuccessfully in both 1922 and 1923. But when the election was suddenly called, Pollard found himself stuck on a lecture tour in America (in the middle, incidentally, of the US presidential contest that saw Republican Calvin Coolidge returned to office).

Unable to return to London, Pollard delegated the running of his university campaign to his daughter, Margaret – known as Peggie – even though she was about to have a baby. In truth, her duties weren’t especially onerous – mainly dealing with Pollard’s election correspondence. He came a poor third, having twice been runner-up (and so abandoned his parliamentary ambitions). When the baby was born, the family sent a clever and very brief telegram to A. F. Pollard in America. It contained no text, and was addressed to ‘David Bothwell’, which meant she had had a baby boy called David, and that both he and his mother were well. But Peggie was slightly disappointed. ‘She liked babies, but didn’t want another boy,’ says Butler.¹ Her first son, Michael, had been born in 1922, following two girls, Christina (1919) and Honora, known as ‘Nora’ (1920) – four children in less than six years.

They called the new baby David Henry Edgeworth Butler (though he would abandon the Henry as soon as he got to university). Edgeworth was from his Irish ancestors, who included the nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth and the economist Francis Edgeworth, on whose knee David was dandled as a baby. Both were substantial figures in their different ways. David’s father had ‘Edgeworth’ as a middle name, and two of his sons would get Edgeworth as part of their names, too, almost as if the family had the double-barrelled surname ‘Edgeworth-Butler’.

His Butler ancestors were so distinguished academically as to earn inclusion as one of the nine great English intellectual families identified in an essay by the historian Noel Annan.² The family included numerous Oxbridge dons and four headmasters of top public schools. The future Conservative Deputy Prime Minister ‘Rab’ Butler was David’s second cousin. Rab was still studying at Cambridge in 1924, having just been president of the Union. The social reformer Josephine Butler was David’s great-aunt. (See the Appendix for more details of David Butler’s extraordinary ancestry.)

Harold Butler, David’s father, was Professor of Latin at University College London (UCL), where he’d succeeded the poet A. E. Housman. At Oxford, he’d been something of a poet himself, having in 1899 won the prestigious Newdigate Prize, whose previous winners included John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde and – the year before Butler – John Buchan. Harold had become a lecturer at New College at the age of just twenty-three, before moving to UCL ten years later. He was known for having an extraordinary memory, and it was said that if Harold read an article in The Times twice, he could then recite it verbatim afterwards. Although he served as a lieutenant and then captain in the Royal Artillery during the First World War, he never saw action. ‘As a teacher,’ said his Times obituary many years later, ‘he was kindly and encouraging, providing that a real effort had been made to attain his own exacting standard of scholarship, but he had no patience with slipshod work, and his disapproving silence could sometimes be, as it was meant to be, intimidating.’³

It was in 1917, when he was thirty-nine, that Harold Butler married Margaret ‘Peggie’ Pollard, just twenty-two, who had previously been one of his students, and worked during the First World War as a nurse in various London hospitals. Since 1919, the family had lived at 16 Taviton Street in Bloomsbury, in the area around UCL, a short walk from the University Senate House. It was a tall, Georgian terraced house, for which Harold Butler had acquired a 32-year lease from the Duke of Bedford, whose estate owned many of the properties in Bloomsbury. (A modern block today stands on the site – part of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, now subsumed into UCL.) In the early part of the twentieth century, this area was home to the Bloomsbury Group, the famous set of talented bohemian artists and friends who shocked people with their liberal lifestyles. They ‘lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles’, observed the American writer and wit Dorothy Parker, though the Butlers were never part of that geometry.⁴

Fifty yards south of where the old Butler home once stood, Taviton Street leads into Gordon Square, which can perhaps be  regarded as the spiritual home of the Bloomsbury Group. The writer Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell had lived briefly at 46 Gordon Square during the early 1900s, and the house was occupied during the 1920s and ’30s by one of the most influential men of the twentieth century: John Maynard Keynes, the foremost example of an academic who exercised great influence on government affairs, not just in Britain, but globally. When David was a baby, the Butlers’ nanny would trundle him in his pram down to the enclosed garden in the middle of Gordon Square, for which the family paid seven pounds a year for access. Later, David would ride his tricycle along the pavement. He recalls seeing Keynes on occasion, but the family never had any dealings with the economist. Harold Butler disapproved of his lifestyle (though he probably didn’t know the extent of Keynes’s bisexual promiscuity). His father was on far better terms with another member of the Bloomsbury Group, the historian Lytton Strachey, who lived at 51 Gordon Square. Today, a blue plaque on the house commemorates the whole group.

Among David Butler’s early memories are occasional glimpses of George V, when the King’s car passed through the streets of Bloomsbury en route to Sandringham in Norfolk. His first political memory is, at the age of six, standing outside a school polling station in St Pancras in the 1931 general election, while his mother went inside to cast her vote for the Conservative candidate in support of the National Government, the coalition led by the former Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald.

It’s hard to think of a more academic milieu outside of Oxford and Cambridge. Harold Butler walked home every lunchtime from his office on Gordon Square, though despite the proximity Peggie Butler invariably complained of him being late. Nearby were the offices of the Institute of Historical Research, founded by her father, A. F. Pollard, in 1921.

Like most middle-class families of that era, the Butlers employed several servants as well as nannies. As Butler recalls, ‘My father earned £1,200 a year, then up to £1,600 a year. There was little money in the family, though we were comfortably off. The servants were each paid about £200 a year. School fees were £15 a term for each of us.’⁵ During one tight family squeeze in the late 1920s, they had to get rid of one of the nannies, together with a housemaid and the cook. After that, Peggie Butler cooked the family meals herself. When David went to school, she started doing voluntary social work at the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in Lambeth, which had been founded by Harold Butler’s oldest sister Olive. The settlement tried to ameliorate medical conditions for deprived children in local state schools, and she dealt with non-attendance and other social problems.

David recalls how he told his sister Nora one day, ‘Mummy hasn’t exactly got great beauty or charm, but she’s what Daddy would call a thoroughly good fellow.’ Nora then related these remarks to their father, who was reportedly very pleased.⁶ Harold Butler loved spending time with his family, and while Peggie wanted him to go lecturing in America – so that she could go too – he declined because he didn’t want to be apart from his children.

David Butler’s earliest recollection is of weeping (about something long forgotten) on a beach in Aberdovey in Wales in the summer of 1927, when he would have been approaching his third birthday. Harold Butler hated London and got out as often as he could. In the long summer break, the family would leave the capital for several weeks to go and stay with aunts at Beechwood, a house near Birdlip in Gloucestershire. Butler’s paternal grandfather had bought the property in 1882, and then extended it, and the home seems to have been as close to a rural idyll as one could imagine. ‘It was an extremely happy place,’ Butler says. ‘There were lots of books acquired over forty years; a large garden; but no car.’ The house had no mains water. ‘We had rain water accumulated and had to pump it to make sure the loos worked. It didn’t have electricity either, so I learnt about trimming lamps and tidying up candles and that sort of thing.’⁷

In the evenings, like most middle-class families in the pretelevision era, they played cards and their parents read to the children. ‘Daddy usually read to Christina and Nora while Mummy read to Michael and me,’ he says. ‘Most of Dickens, some Scott, and some Shakespeare. The rhythm of the English language at its best was subconsciously absorbed by me.’⁸

The garden contained a huge sycamore tree, which stood boldly as if it were marking the very top of the Cotswolds. ‘It had a rope on it and I could climb the rope rather well,’ says Butler.⁹ The family would go for long walks, or for rides on bicycles, which they’d brought with them on the train from London. Every day they’d visit the local farm to collect milk and eggs, and in summer they’d often help out in the fields.

Another regular holiday destination was A. F. Pollard’s large home at Milford-on-Sea in Hampshire, which also held an extensive library. The house was just eighty yards from the cliffs, which looked out towards the Needles off the Isle of Wight. ‘Grandfather Pollard’ was a strong swimmer, and the family would change in the house then clamber over the cliffs to go swimming in the sea. Butler was ‘slightly frightened’ of Pollard. ‘He was rather strict,’ he says, ‘but I didn’t have a dislike for him. He would express strong views on a large number of things. He was a very wide-ranging scholar but was caustic in his views about other scholars.’¹⁰ Pollard was a clear influence on Butler. ‘I saw him, and talked to him, and heard him, and picked up books from his shelves – from the age of ten to fourteen.’¹¹

Family holidays also included trips to archaeological excavations in St Albans and at Maiden Castle in Dorset, which were being carried out by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a friend of Harold Butler at UCL. In both 1931 and 1933, they spent several weeks on the Isle of Eigg in the Hebrides, an island some of his ancestors had once owned in its entirety.

David went to Camden House Prep School in Baker Street for four terms, and he remembers one occasion when the street nearby was covered in straw to dull the noise of traffic while the famous writer Arnold Bennett lay dying in his local flat. Since Harold Butler was a governor of St Paul’s, the distinguished boys’ independent day school in Hammersmith, it seemed an obvious choice for the Butlers to send all their children to St Paul’s and its sister school for girls. But first, from about the age of seven, David and his older brother Michael attended Colet Court, the St Paul’s preparatory school, which had about 400 pupils. This involved a simple journey from Euston Square every morning along the Metropolitan Line. It provided the boys with exciting train-spotting opportunities at Paddington Station, where the line comes out of the tunnel into the open air and runs parallel to the Great Western tracks for about a mile. The Tube train would pass King-class steam locomotives at the end of the Paddington platforms, stoking up to start their journeys west, and there was also an engine stabling yard just outside the mainline station. David and Michael, like many young boys of that era, would then underline the numbers and names of locos they’d seen in published handbooks which listed every railway engine in Britain.

Among David Butler’s contemporaries at Colet Court was the future actor, broadcaster and comedy performer Nicholas Parsons, who was a year older, and recalls the ten- and eleven-year-old Butler walking with him round the playground earnestly discussing great political issues of the day, such as the abdication crisis, and the build-up to what would become the Second World War. ‘Obviously from a very early age he was deeply interested in politics. He had great knowledge for a youngster,’ says Parsons. ‘It fired me up to be interested in current affairs. I remember talking to him about Abyssinia, and the Italian invasion, and what would happen next.’¹²

When Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of the coalition National Government, called an election in 1935, Colet Court held a mock election. David says he voted Conservative (as his parents probably did that year) but was rather disappointed that an older boy was chosen as Tory contender instead of him. The Conservative candidate at Colet Court collected almost 80 per cent of the vote, he remembers. After that, ‘I was hooked on elections. I absorbed all the 1935 constituency figures, and then went back to 1931 and 1929. I looked for close results and lost deposits.’¹³

It was also around 1935 that Butler began his long relationship with broadcasting – through listening to the BBC. ‘When Grandmother Pollard died in 1934, my mother inherited some money, and we bought a radio. I would sneak in and listen to the news or to variety programmes.’¹⁴ Although the BBC began broadcasting its television service in 1936, it would be another decade before he actually saw a TV set in operation.

David Butler also recalls ‘going out with the Silver Jubilee crowds’ in May 1935, and then, eight months later, he got ‘tangled up in the funeral of George V, but didn’t see very much’.¹⁵ Butler was at Colet Court on 11 December 1936 when Edward VIII delivered his abdication speech on the radio – the headmaster had installed loudspeakers in the school hall so that everyone could hear the King’s live broadcast. ‘I remember being told about it a few days ahead. We didn’t see the popular papers at home – they had started hinting about it in October. So, we only knew about a full-scale crisis for about ten days. We were not insiders. It came out of the blue.’ There was no sense of shock, he says, but later ‘there was a sense that Wallis Simpson would not have been a desirable queen’.¹⁶ The day after Edward VIII abdicated, he recalls, ‘our maid came up to our bedrooms at 7.15 a.m. and showed us The Times with black borders’.

The following year, 1937, David visited the House of Commons for the first time, and he recollects how he and his father looked down from the public gallery to see Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the green benches below, along with his most famous living predecessor, David Lloyd George.

David also took prominent roles in school drama, acting alongside Nicholas Parsons and the future broadcaster and Liberal MP Clement Freud. It seems astonishing today that a national newspaper should have been interested in the drama productions of prep schools, but in March 1936 the Daily Telegraph published a short review of Colet Court’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘The result was charming,’ wrote the reviewer, who concluded with the words, ‘D. H. E. Butler was a most puckish Puck.’¹⁷ David Butler was still only eleven, and this was probably his first ever mention in the national press. The Butler family were keen theatregoers and often visited the Tavistock Little Theatre in Bloomsbury, or the Old Vic in Waterloo, where they saw the rising star Laurence Olivier on several occasions.

Butler says he didn’t know he was ‘reasonably clever’ until he came first in arithmetic around 1936, when he received the Complete Works of Shakespeare as a prize.¹⁸ English was another of his best subjects – he came fourth out of twenty-one boys in his first year, 1932, and third out of fourteen in his final year, 1938. He was also an excellent story-writer. In January 1936, he wrote a long detective mystery called ‘The Glass Bird, or Murder, Money and Monomania’, about a series of strange deaths. The story is extremely advanced for an eleven-year-old, with a good plot, extensive vocabulary and a surprising knowledge of London and institutions such as the Royal Academy and coroners’ courts.¹⁹ The central character is Henry Augustus Jade, a Royal Academy member who seems to be loosely based on Augustus John, the bohemian artist who was a fellow of UCL. Harold Butler was so proud of his son’s story that he typed it up himself and bound the work in a hardback folder.

David Butler was quite fond of sport, too. He even won two school gymnastic contests at Colet Court, and played rugby fives, and then occasionally for a school XV when he went to St Paul’s, though he was never a dazzling success at team games. In cricket, his highest score was just eight and, rather than on the pitch, it was as team scorer that David excelled, reflecting his passion for numbers.

Harold Butler would regularly take his son to the Varsity match at Twickenham or to Test matches. Almost eighty years later, Butler would retain extraordinarily detailed memories of going with schoolmates to the Ashes Test at Lords in 1938, where they saw Wally Hammond rescue England with an innings of 240. ‘England were 31–3, then Hammond got 70 between 11.30 and 1 p.m.; 70 between 1.45 and 4.15; 70 runs after tea, and then he got 30 the following day.’ Every spring, David bought a copy of Wisden, the distinctive yellow almanac of first-class cricket over the previous twelve months; he loved juggling with cricket statistics and calculating batting and bowling averages. ‘I knew all the cricket statistics from 1935 to 1939, then statistics dried up when war broke out.’²⁰ He even claims to have had the knack of recalculating a batsman or bowler’s average ball by ball as the game progressed.

In 1938, after six years, David left Colet Court. His father had put his son down for Rugby, where Harold himself had gone, but the family instead chose St Paul’s, where brother Michael was already a pupil, and David was awarded a scholarship. This should have relieved the family of school fees, but Harold Butler disapproved of scholarships and so carried on paying them. The St Paul’s uniform was ‘suitable for the late Victorian City’, recalled contemporary Denis Gildea, with ‘black coat, pinstripe trousers, white shirt, stiff white collar, black tie and black and white school cap. In summer, we wore straw boaters with a school ribbon.’²¹ Boys who were more than six feet tall, or who were in the final year, could wear bowler hats – but if they did so, they had to carry an umbrella too.

In his first two years at St Paul’s, Butler concentrated on his father’s field, classics, but switched at the age of fifteen to what the school called Modern Special. This involved classes in literature, languages and history, but also more advanced subjects for secondary schools at that time, such as economics, politics, philosophy and psychology. Another contemporary, Richard Mayne, who was in the same class as Butler (and went on to work for Jean Monnet, one of the architects of modern Europe), described it as being like the Oxford University PPE course – philosophy, politics and economics. In his memoirs, Mayne wrote that ‘one exciting term’, an opinion poll was held in class, ‘chiefly organised by a quick, darting boy called by us Fanny Butler, though properly known by his initials D. H. E.’ Sadly, Mayne’s book didn’t explain where ‘Fanny’ came from.²² The poll sounds highly innovative given that the first professional opinion polls – by Dr George Gallup – arrived in Britain only in 1938. Butler remembers the exercise, and says it was inspired by Gallup’s early polling work, though he merely asked thirty or forty boys in the playground a few non-political questions.

Mayne and Butler have both said that one of the most impressive and influential of their masters was W. H. Eynon Smith, ‘a totally eccentric teacher’, says Butler, ‘who would make a monstrous statement, and then say, Now, prove this is false. I think he had thirteen boys in his history class and ten got awards to Oxford or Cambridge. He was seen as a genius.’²³ Smith would usually wear a grey check jacket and often a garish red tie, along with bottle-green corduroy trousers tucked into black boots. ‘Eynon’s voice was normally quiet, calm, and civilised,’ Richard Mayne wrote,

and the tone of our time with him was essentially ‘rational’ – one of his favourite words … For us, rationality became a catchword for the intellectual integrity he sought to instil, basing judgement on all the available facts, or suspending it if the facts were insufficient … He urged us to exclude all but the cogent, relevant arguments, to ask pointed questions, and not to be put off by emotional pressure or self-regarding temptation. He encouraged open discussion, but refused to let it degenerate into an argument or a merely two-sided debate.²⁴

Sadly, Eynon Smith would be killed in a London bombing raid towards the end of the Second World War.

Another great influence on Butler was Walter Oakeshott, who was high master – the St Paul’s equivalent of headmaster – throughout the war years, and later became Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and Vice-Chancellor of the university. ‘He was incredibly energetic,’ Butler says, ‘very much a hero to me – a super man, wise and interesting.’²⁵ Oakeshott was tall and scholarly looking, known for his beaming smile and natural courtesy, and despite his heavy workload as high master, he tried to teach as many classes in school as he could for one period a week.

And he was exciting. I remember during the Norway campaign in 1940, he gave a beautiful exposition of how we were going to lose Norway, quite early in the campaign. If I was asked for the person in my life I had most admired, I think it would be Walter Oakeshott.²⁶

Walter Oakeshott’s biggest achievement at St Paul’s was successfully overseeing the school’s wartime evacuation and its return to Hammersmith six years later. By 1938, war with Nazi Germany looked highly likely, though the Munich Agreement that September at least gave schools time to plan for the possibility of hostilities, and to prepare an operation to evacuate from London. Oakeshott arranged for St Paul’s to occupy Easthampstead Park, a Victorian mansion near Crowthorne in Berkshire, which was rearranged to house classrooms, the library, dining facilities and school offices. And Wellington College, the public school which was about four miles away, let St Paul’s share their science laboratories and playing fields. The plan was that once war was declared, everyone would be moved to Berkshire immediately. During the run-up to war, the assumption was that London would be attacked almost at once, and, in Denis Gildea’s words, ‘We all expected to be blasted to smithereens by Guernica-style bombing in the first week, so that transport would be in chaos.’²⁷

Accordingly, St Paul’s organised pupils to get to Crowthorne by bicycle from a series of meeting points in west London, and even carried out dress rehearsals, which involved David and Michael Butler completing half the journey by cycling out as far as Staines. Boys without bikes were expected to walk to Crowthorne, with an overnight stop en route. Spare clothing and emergency food rations for each pupil were sent ahead to Easthampstead and stored there in readiness.

In the event, when Britain declared war on 3 September 1939, the Butlers were on holiday in Shropshire, so they simply cycled the eighty or so miles down to the house in Birdlip in Gloucestershire, and remained there while Peggie Butler looked after a family who had been evacuated from London, and David and Michael did a milk round for a local farmer. It was two weeks before the boys set off for Crowthorne by train.

St Paul’s acquired about ten houses in the Crowthorne area to accommodate around thirty pupils and staff in each, with five or six to a bedroom. These were large, comfortable properties, some of which belonged to retired colonels who had been at the military academy at nearby Sandhurst or the staff college in Camberley. Butler, though, was assigned to Meadhurst, the home of a warder at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, as the high-security psychiatric hospital was known at that time. In effect, St Paul’s had become a temporary boarding school. Having people spread over a large area, with everyone relying on bicycles, was far from satisfactory, and during the heavy snows of 1940, pupils were confined for several weeks to their houses, receiving very little tuition.

Even in tranquil Berkshire, St Paul’s knew it was vulnerable to attack. Trenches were dug in the school grounds, for use in case of air raids, and sandbags were filled for emergencies. Easthampstead Park was also used by the Army, which erected several Nissen huts. And, in 1941, the Army’s presence may have been the reason a series of German bombs were dropped along the main drive, one of which hit the lodge at the front gate. The school’s long-standing Officer Training Corps was renamed the Junior Training Corps (JTC), and in 1941 even had an inspection from Old Boy Lt General Bernard Montgomery, who was reportedly extra-rigorous and ‘looked at everyone’s haircut’.²⁸ St Paul’s also set up its own Home Guard platoon, comprising about sixty boys. ‘We were issued with new American rifles with a jutting barrel and .300 bore,’ said Denis Gildea.

We wore the normal Second [World] War battledress and kept our rifles at home. We had to take turns to guard the company headquarters at night. It was an old shed in the middle of Crowthorne where our ammunition was stored. We each did nearly two hours alone outside on sentry duty.²⁹

David Butler recalls being out on patrol one night as a lowly assistant ARP warden. ‘I was bicycling along the edge of the grounds and saw a bomb go down. And the next thing we heard was that the headmaster of Wellington had been killed.’³⁰ The German bomb had landed directly on his home.

While David was boarding in Crowthorne, his parents had moved to mid-Wales, as Harold Butler was placed in charge